Browse Books

Stats

Friends

Recent Comments

"The code of silence and total denial of any possibility that there are bad cops and cops who make deadly bad decisions" You are likely NOT to meet an officer who would deny there are bad cops, nor will you meet a cop that will state that there is no possibility that cops can make deadly bad decisions. What are you basing your comments on? Hyperbole is unbecoming and negates credibility of journalists.

According to the FBI statistics, there were approximately 550 homicides by police (justified and unjustified combined) in 1975. The population of the US was 216 million, 0.0003% of which died at the hands of the police justifiably and unjustifiably. The FBI statistics show that in 2012, there a little over 400 homicides by police, justified and unjustified combined. The population of the US was 313.9 million, roughly 0.0001% of which died at the hands of police justifiably and unjustifiably. Do you know how many people die due to malpractice each year? In 2010, 180,000 Medicare patients died due to medical malpractice. That is just Medicare patients. The Journal of Patient Safety states that the number of total patients dieing each year do to mistakes at the hospital are between 210,000 and 440,000. These numbers cover those who go to the hospital for care and suffer from some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death. That is roughly 0.14% of the US population killed unjustifiably only.

People forget that the police did not make the decision of "no indictment". The jury did. Even if there is a code to protect bad cops, it would not make a difference because they are not the jury. Besides, good cops want bad cops off the streets every bit as much as the public does. Bad cops put the lives of good cops in jeopardy because they make hasty decisions that could escalate a situation unnecessarily. Use your heads, People. Instead of this article being about police departments covering up for their bad apples (though it was very well written), why not ask the question we should all be asking and that is, why did the jury of each situation come to the decision they made? What evidence have they been made privy to that the general public has not? Was it because of the way a law was written and there was a technicality that got them off? Or do they have eye witnesses that saw something different than what has been reported on the news? Not someone reciting hearsay from a neighbor who wasn't there either, but actual EYEwitness accounts. Why aren't these questions being asked? You would think that after the case in Ferguson revealing that pretty much everything we were told by "witnesses" interviewed by the news was a lie that we would ask the same questions about the other cases... but people want to forget that we were all duped in the first place. Lay down your pride and ask the right questions. Then, accept the FACTS (not hearsay) and move on to a more urgent problem to solve, like the fact that more than 3.4 million people die each year from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related causes. Nearly all deaths, 99 percent, occur in the developing world. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every four hours, but we are whining over the death of criminals who CHOSE to put themselves in their situation. Priorities and perspective are lost on so many...